


feel it break (nothing's a mistake)

by kimaracretak



Series: gracie shepard: if the sun can radiate then so can i [3]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Gen, Past Character Death, Post-Virmire, gracie and wrex deal with their feelings (by lighting cocktails on fire), gracie shepard's amazing galaxy-spanning pirate family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-16
Updated: 2016-09-16
Packaged: 2018-08-14 22:55:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8032240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kimaracretak/pseuds/kimaracretak
Summary: (capture something red / paste it to the end of your bed): For all the death she's seen, she's known surprisingly little loss, and the emptiness doesn't settle in her chest.Gracie, post-Virmire





	feel it break (nothing's a mistake)

**Author's Note:**

> title + summary quote from austra, 'the beat and the pulse'

She'll have to go back for Alenko.

It's the only clear thought in her head as Ashley writhes delirious in her arms babbling for a shotgun long abandoned in the rubble and she watches Liara and Garrus tumble through the _Normandy_ 's open hatch ahead of her.

Not immediately, though, not while the aftershocks of the nuke are still thrumming through ship and crew alike. _Immediately_ is lying on the cargo bay with Ash's body until the medical team comes to take her. _Immediately_ is telling Joker to head to the Citadel and Pressly to deal with setting up shore leave rotations. Keep them, at least, busy, since she can't exactly take a shuttle and find a planet that has only Geth and none of her people to blow up too.

(She would have, once.)

 _Immediately_  is a blur.

In her quarters, Gracie punches the wall and bares her teeth at the Alliance enhancements that stop the damage and the pain before she can see any evidence of it across her hand.

The _fucking_  Alliance.

Fucking Alliance making her give up her first crew and now forcing her to leave the bodies of this new one scattered across the galaxy like those fucking Salarian ID tags that she keeps fucking tripping over.

 _Let me show you how it's done_  indeed. She isn't any better than they are now.

Gracie showers as quickly as she can, lets the water wash away the last of Virmire's rain. She doesn't bother getting dressed again, just lies on her bed in her underwear and feels each thin strand of her hair dry against her back in the _Normandy_ 's suddenly stiflingly hot air. Her omni-tool flashes at her, messages that she needs to read and reports she needs to sign off on.

She ignores them all. For all the death she's seen, she's known surprisingly little loss, and the emptiness doesn't settle in her chest.

The motion-sensitive lights have dimmed by the time Gracie finally reaches for her omni-tool and starts flicking through messages. Liara, offering words of comfort and sweets. Ash, out of surgery and asking to see her when the doctors let her out of bed — _or before, it's been an hour and I can't stop thinking about ... anything. Or maybe later. Tali's here now._ Helena, a note of thanks for killing her two associates with a hastily scrawled _I heard about Virmire. Take care of yourself too, little one._  as a post-script. She still handwrites and scans her letters, and Gracie's fondness is overshadowed by the knowledge that they had too little time to talk on Amaranthine. She yearns for her surrogate grandmother now more than she ever has.

But the last message is the worst.

_Gray. Alcohol._

For the first time, the sight of her nickname makes her feel sick. Kaidan had known exactly what he was getting himself into when he left for the AA tower, known exactly what it meant when he accepted her last order to _fight hard, die proud_. She's responsible for that, for choosing Ashley and the bomb, and she's not going to let her anger at the circumstances that forced her choice to shade into self-hatred.

But Wrex.

She had nearly killed him too, stared him in the eye and pulled her pistol's trigger. For the mission. For the _galaxy_. And now they have to walk back from that, somehow.

Still, she knows him. _You're outside my door right now, aren't you?_  she types back.

Her door chimes in response. Gracie throws her head back on her pillow and groans, biting her lip. Better, at least, to get this done with now, and leave their time on the Citadel to mellow out the fallout from their combined tendency to run headfirst at problems until things exploded.

Neither of them got caught in this explosion, she reminds herself as she pulls on a pair of shorts and opens the door. That has to count.

Wrex offers a bottle in greeting. "Shepard."

Asari honey mead. The same drink she spilled all over him in some nowhere corner of Omega the night they met.

"Wrex." She takes the bottle, spins it around in her hands. "Come on. Sit."

He settles himself on the floor, and Gracie finds a spot on her cluttered desk where the bottle probably won't tip over every time they come out of a relay. And then she hesitates. On a normal night, she would make them both some sort of flammable cocktails and tuck herself into his side and they'd light drinks on fire one by one and drown them until the memory of the mushroom cloud on Virmire dissipated. But it isn't a normal night.

They haven't had a normal night in months. They might never have a normal night again.

But then Wrex holds out his arms, and she makes her decision. Crosses the room and lets him wrap her in a one-armed hug that probably would have crushed someone without her implants.

They sit in silence for a long time, long enough that Gracie starts to think she could fall asleep right there on the floor. Finally, though, when the silence is too much, she says, "You're still my brother, Wrex. Even if I had killed you, you would still be my brother."

He sighs, and she feels his shiver in every bone in her body. "You're still my sister, too. It would have been okay, if ... I would have understood."

Gracie chokes on tears she absolutely will not allow and pulls back just enough to punch him in the arm. "Dumbass. Of course it wouldn't have been okay."

Wrex half-laughs, and it's so unbearably _him_ , so utterly _alive_  that she can't stand it. She settles back into his side, rests her head on his shoulder. "But I would have understood, too, if you had."

It's as close to an apology as either one of them will allow.

"Hey," he says abruptly, and Gracie smiles at the change of subject.

"Yeah?"

"If you punch the Council when you report to them, can I watch?"

She laughs for real then, all the tension between them finally cracking for good. "Tempting as that is, I think I'm going to have to settle for dramatically hanging up on them via conference call. The Navy's just begging for a reason to get me returned to their command, and I'm having none of that."

"I could do it for you."

He is, she thinks, the best person she could possibly have at her side, and her anger at Saren for nearly taking that from her rises again. "Nah. But you could make me a drink. Something we can set on fire."

Wrex grins. "You got it, Gray."


End file.
